Khalid al Masri is a broken man today. A decade after the CIA snatched him by mistake, flew him half way around the world in secret, and questioned him as part of its detention and interrogation program, he’s yet to recover.

He’s abandoned his home. He no longer is part of the lives of his wife or children. Friends can’t find him. His attorneys can’t find him. German foreign intelligence will say only that he’s “somewhere in a western-leaning Arab nation.”

The United States has returned four Afghans from Guantanamo Bay back to their home country.

U.S. officials say the transfer from the detention center is a sign of their confidence in new Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

Administration officials say they worked quickly to fulfil his request to return the four detainees. They had been cleared for transfer as a kind of reconciliation and an indication of improved U.S.-Afghan relations.

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”

Federal prosecutors sued New York City on Thursday to speed the pace of reforms at the Rikers Island jail complex and address what a Justice Department investigation found was a "deep-seated culture of violence" against young inmates.

The move comes a day after Mayor Bill de Blasio visited the 10-jail lockup to announce the end of solitary confinement for 16- and 17-year-old inmates, a policy change initiated after the 2 1/2-year federal probe released in August.

A judge threw out the conviction Wednesday of black teen executed 70 years ago for the deaths of two white girls.

George Stinney Jr., 14, was convicted of the grisly murders of Betty June Binnicker, 11, and Mary Emma Thames, 7, in Alcolu, S.C. The girls had disappeared in March 1944 while riding their bicycles, and their bludgeoned bodies were found in a watery ditch along a road in the town, about 70 miles north of Charleston.

Health professionals who assisted in the CIA’s torture programme of terror suspects “betrayed the most fundamental duty of the healing professions” and may have committed war crimes, according to a hard-hitting report released on Tuesday.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) called for a federal commission to investigate the full extent of health professionals’ participation in CIA torture following last week’s release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the agency’s detention and interrogation programme.